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13-Inch MacBook Pro With M2 Chip Review - MacRumors
Tim Cook gives clearest hint yet that Apple's building a headset - CNBC
Ikea's new virtual design tool deletes your furniture and replaces it with Ikea's - The Verge

13-Inch MacBook Pro With M2 Chip Review - MacRumors

Posted: 22 Jun 2022 06:17 AM PDT

The new 13-inch MacBook Pro with a faster M2 chip launches this Friday. Ahead of time, early reviews of the notebook have been shared by some YouTube channels and media outlets, offering a hands-on look at the performance improvements.

13 inch macbook pro m2 mock feature 2
The only notable change to the 13-inch MacBook Pro is the M2 chip, which features an 8-core CPU and a 10-core GPU. Apple said the M2 chip has up to an 18% faster CPU, up to a 35% faster GPU, and up to a 40% faster Neural Engine compared to the M1 chip. The new 13-inch MacBook Pro features the same design as the previous model, including the Touch Bar and two Thunderbolt 3 ports on the left side of the machine.

The new 13-inch MacBook Pro's headphone jack has also gained support for high-impedance headphones, in line with the 14-inch and 16-inch models.

With the M2 chip, the 13-inch MacBook Pro can be configured with up to 24GB of unified memory, whereas the M1 chip maxes out at 16GB of memory. In line with the previous model, the notebook also supports up to 2TB of SSD storage.

13-inch MacBook Pro pricing continues to start at $1,299 in the United States, with space gray and silver color options available.

Reviews

Many reviews agreed that it might be worth waiting for the redesigned MacBook Air with the M2 chip, which Apple says will be available in July. The new MacBook Air starts at a lower price of $1,199 and features newer design elements like MagSafe charging, a 1080p camera, thinner bezels around the display, physical function keys, and more.

However, one notable difference between the notebooks is that the MacBook Air features a fanless design, while the MacBook Pro has an active cooling system to ensure sustained performance for users with more demanding workflows.

WIRED's Brenda Stoylar:

If you just need a good, new laptop, wait for the upcoming MacBook Air. You get a slightly larger, more modern-looking screen, a better webcam, nicer speakers, and a fast-charging support, all in an overall lighter package (and fun colors!). This MacBook Pro remains an awkward middle child and doesn't bring nearly enough to the table to be worth your while.

Gizmodo's Phillip Tracy:

Viewed in a vacuum, the MacBook Pro 13 is a great laptop with outstanding performance and unbeatable battery life, characteristics that put it ahead of some of its PC rivals. Zoom out and it's hard to see where this model fits within Apple's portfolio. The most direct rival to this entry-level Pro isn't the more premium versions, but rather, the MacBook Air. Not only does the Air have a lower starting price, but it has a larger display, a better webcam, quad speakers, more interesting color options, a slimmer chassis, and the benefit of a traditional shortcut row.

The Verge's Monica Chin:

This would be the perfect device for someone like me — if it weren't for the new MacBook Air. This new MacBook Air, also powered by the M2, is coming very soon. It will be, as far as I can tell from Apple's website, the same price as the M2 MacBook Pro for the same specs in most cases (they level out at the $1,499 mark). But, unlike the MacBook Pro, the M2 MacBook Air did get a big redesign, and it includes all kinds of new features — including new colors, a larger display, a 1080p webcam, and, especially, MagSafe — that this device doesn't have.

Chin shared several benchmarks comparing the new 13-inch MacBook Pro with the previous model powered by the M1 chip. Geekbench 5 results confirm the new 13-inch MacBook Pro has up to 18-20% faster multi-core performance than the previous model.

TheStreet's Jacob Krol said the new 13-inch MacBook Pro delivers even more impressive battery life compared to the previous model:

Notably, our battery test beat the promised 20 hours of video playback that Apple was promising. In our testing, the 13-inch MacBook Pro lasted for 23 hours and 15 minutes with a 4K playback test. I also set the brightness to 50% and turned off connectivity during the playback. It's quite impressive, and in day-to-day use, it's tough to make the MacBook Pro die.

I could easily have the 13-inch MacBook Pro last over a full day of use, coming in around 18 hours of full use, and the laptop can sit in standby mode for several days.

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Tim Cook gives clearest hint yet that Apple's building a headset - CNBC

Posted: 22 Jun 2022 11:35 AM PDT

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Apple CEO Tim Cook poses for a portrait next to a line of new MacBook Airs as he enters the Steve Jobs Theater during the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) at the Apple Park campus in Cupertino, California on June 6, 2022 .

Chris Tuite | AFP | Getty Images

Apple CEO Tim Cook recently gave the closest thing to a confirmation that Apple's building a headset.

Cook was asked in a recent interview with China Daily USA what he thinks the key factors are for augmented reality, or AR, to succeed in the consumer market.

"I am incredibly excited about AR as you might know. And the critical thing to any technology, including AR, is putting humanity at the center of it," he said, echoing comments he's made in the past about how important AR is to the company.

He then described Apple's work in the space so far, which has been focused on AR apps on the iPhone and iPad, before adding, "But I think we're still in the very early innings of how this technology will evolve. I couldn't be more excited about the opportunities we've seen in this space, and sort of stay tuned and you'll see what we have to offer."

AR or "mixed reality" describes technology that superimposes computer-generated images over views of the real world, contrasted with virtual reality, or VR, which completely immerses the viewer in a computer-generated world.

It's one of the clearest examples yet of Cook acknowledging that Apple has something bigger in the works. While the current apps can be useful for things like mapping a room or seeing if a new piece of furniture might fit, it seems more likely that Apple has been building the library and tools for developers to build apps for something like a headset.

Bloomberg said in May that Apple recently showed its AR/VR headset to the Apple board and that the company plans to announce it as early as the end of this year, although it could slip into next year. The same report said Apple plans to sell the headset in 2023.

Apple would be playing catch-up with a number of other big tech companies, particularly Meta, which changed its name from Facebook last year to signify its revamped focus on immersing users in virtual worlds known as the "metaverse," and Microsoft, which first introduced its Hololens AR glasses in 2016.

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Ikea's new virtual design tool deletes your furniture and replaces it with Ikea's - The Verge

Posted: 22 Jun 2022 06:00 AM PDT

Ikea is launching a new virtual design tool today that can make it easier to imagine how its furniture might look in your home. Ikea Kreativ's Scene Scanner feature lets you scan a room using Ikea's iOS app, erase your existing furniture, and then place virtual furniture in its place. If you don't want to scan your own home, there are also over 50 virtual showrooms to place furniture in. Naturally, the process is designed to encourage you to order this furniture for real after browsing the virtual versions.

After playing around with a pre-release version of the Ikea Kreativ Scene Scanner app developed by Ingka Group (Ikea's largest store franchisee), I can say that the new experience is potentially very useful, even if it's a little more restrictive than the company's pitch makes it seem. There's no ability to walk around a virtual piece of furniture in augmented reality like we saw with the previous Ikea Place app, but Kreativ does a better job overall of showing its virtual furniture accurately in the context of your home. It won't let you skip the tedious process of measuring your rooms to make sure furniture will fit, but it's a nice way of seeing if an item's overall design and color scheme will match its surroundings.

Ikea Kreativ Scene Scanner starts with a slightly cumbersome scanning process. You take a series of photos of a room to construct a panoramic shot and then wave your phone around in a figure-eight motion to capture more visual data. This process is for iPhones only for now (you don't need a model equipped with a lidar sensor — most modern iPhones should work), but an Android version is planned for release this summer. Once the scan is complete, you're left with an image to either tweak directly in the app itself or on Ikea's website on a desktop.

Unless you're furnishing an empty room, the first step with Ikea's virtual designer is to empty out existing furniture. The effect is very similar to the Magic Eraser tool found in Google's Pixel 6 devices, and much like Google's Magic Eraser tool, the results can be inconsistent. In the image below, for example, Ikea's software hasn't understood where my rug should end after deleting the armchair obscuring it, and it also has trouble filling in the concealed left side of the TV cabinet.

In spite of some messy edges, the empty spaces behave as they should once I start adding virtual furniture to the room. Ikea Kreativ currently includes "thousands" of items of furniture, rugs, accessories, and wall decor, according to spokesperson Kelly Gardiner, and there are plans to add support for additional product categories like ceiling-mounted furniture and textiles over the coming year.

I went with a pair of Laiva bookcases for my living room, which Ikea's software allowed me to rotate and move around the space — and did a good job placing level with my floor. For the most part, Ikea's software showed the bookcase in proportion, although it occasionally clipped through various other bits of furniture in the room. It's hard to verify whether the app got the dimensions of my room exactly right, but they were roughly correct after I verified it with a measuring tape.

Ikea Kreativ has the potential to be a helpful little tool. Although only being able to view virtual furniture on a 2D photo seems restrictive, it seemed to give a far more accurate impression of how it might actually look in the space. In contrast, Ikea's older Place app showed virtual furniture at an inconsistent scale in augmented reality, making it hard to imagine how it might fit into its surroundings.

Ikea Kreativ is live now in the US, and a launch in other countries is planned for next year. It can be accessed via Ikea's existing iOS app (required for room scanning) or via its website.

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